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One theory is there was more demand than they anticipated and needed time to catch up. I'm not a believer of that.

One theory is they're trying to artificially created demand. Not a believer in that either as it is more beneficial to sell more now and release a big sale number to the world to increase demand.

My theory is it involved the deals with the brick and mortar stores. In order to make sure the stores can make some money they might have signed an agreement on how many digital copies they could sell compared to physical copies and are waiting for the physical copies to catch up.

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Why were first-party sales of the game halted? Can we take that as a sign that the game is selling a little too well for comfort, given the game's current troubles, or does the team simply want to prevent new players from getting caught up in email delays on registration? How soon might we see sales resume?

Demand for Guild Wars 2 has been well beyond our expectations, and in order to maintain a playable and enjoyable game experience for all of our fans we made the decision to temporarily halt first-party sales while we scale up our capacity and customer support to meet this demand. From the very beginning, we have intended Guild Wars 2 to be a successful game in the long run. Slamming our servers with new players in the name of sales, adversely affecting the entirety of our playerbase, does not fit into that plan.Guild Wars 2 needs to always be an enjoyable, accessible game, and we will do everything within our means to do so.

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Basically because they were exceeding expected sales, so they needed to slow down while they get additional servers up and increase current server capacity. The slow down also allows more spread of population so that when new people come in they'll not only have server space available but be able to get into the game with a reduced overflow burden. Basically, numbers. Too many too fast, time to adjust.

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Anet are a victim of their own success.

Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority. We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.

Effective immediately we have disabled sales via buy.guildwars2.com. To be clear, box and digital sales are still available via our retail partners. We are tracking our concurrency closely while expanding our infrastructure. We’ll re-enable first-party digital sales as soon as we feel that we can do so safely. ~RB2

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I will say I am amazed at how many people will just accept what a company says at face value. It could be the truth it could not be the truth. The reason you don't know is companies spin/hide/lie about the truth all the time.

I have to wonder if those same people listen to a political speech and just walk away going "Man so many truthful things I never knew before!"

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Originally posted by RaysheMy opinion is that they need to slow the sales so that their support team can get big enough so people aren't waiting days to get a GM to help them. they are likely hireing new GM's ATM.

Your opinion is quite different from what Anet has said. Your opinion reeks of alarmist rhetoric.

Anyways OP, as you can plainly see Anet is trying to do what is best for the players. Which is another reason why I think this company is the best.

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I don't think anyone really knows. I am apt to believe that perhaps all the kinks weren't as worked out as well as they anticipated....or perhaps the influx of purchases and the troubles during the the first day of EA made them panic a little. It may also be all the reasons people listed above. But I do think they are not losing as many purchases as many are apt to believe; I think most of the purchases they initially anticipated were done by preorders and prepurchasers.

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Originally posted by SnarlingWolfUnfortunately I would also never quote a company to find the real answer either. PR is big in the corporate world and everything is spun into a positive no matter what it is.

But we can see the servers are packed and support taking a long time to reply.

So what they have said has pretty much been true so far. I doubt they are ignoring support tickets..

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So why did they stop selling the digital copy? For a game that is not subscription based this really concerns me. It is very odd. Please enlighten me.

from my perspective or should i say my opinion is they are having trouble coping with the numbers atm and are playing catchup on security,ie hacking .reason i think this is because if they let more in before they have sorted the problems out it could end up giving them more of a headache than it already is..atm people who have been hacked are told they will have accounts back within 72 hrs or at least their tickets will be.if they allow more into the game without solving the current problems they are asking for a bigger headache..they will get there evenually..its just going to take time..other peoples opinion will differ.

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Of course things are spun positively, on the flip side to that is when things go baddly if you accept the responsibility for it..the base will forgive you. (Bet you didn't see that did you guru's?)

GAMES: Games compete with manufacturers (publishers) this is a rarity in the world where buying direct from manufacturer is not generally allowed, only in software is this really able to be done.

This cuts into your retailers bottom lines, your retailers will give you the fist of god via a anti-trust (As you guys have bound together under an agreement). You undermine your "partners" and you'll get sued.

You may not lose the case but the case against you is usually enough for retailers to be wary and enough cases and bam you look like a terrible lot with great lawyers.

So while it's cute to hear artificial demand/supply the facts are you can still buy them from the retailer.

This is one of the reasons the game market is tanking, direct from publisher effects many jobs in retail.

Start thinking like adults and less like every company is out to kill/steal from you.

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Originally posted by Woopin

Originally posted by SnarlingWolfUnfortunately I would also never quote a company to find the real answer either. PR is big in the corporate world and everything is spun into a positive no matter what it is.

But we can see the servers are packed and support taking a long time to reply.

So what they have said has pretty much been true so far. I doubt they are ignoring support tickets..

Correlation is not causation.

Just because they have a queue (like every single major MMO does at launch), does not mean that they stopped online sales because of that. It actually makes no sense at all because people could just go out and buy all the physical copies to continue to make the queues worse.